


my sister's country

by Esmenet



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-17
Updated: 2011-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:59:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esmenet/pseuds/Esmenet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zuko never wanted to be an only child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my sister's country

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [fic_promptly](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/), with the prompt of 'he's a fraud'.

Zuko is a liar and a fraud and a fake.

And a fool, too, for trying at all. He's not a Fire Lord; whose damnfool idea was it to try and pretend he was? Uncle's, it had been. And Zuko had been convinced, too -- it all sounded so sensible, right up until the point where he remembered what being Fire Lord meant.

He was the crown prince, but the duties of a young crown prince are firebending, music, knowledge of the classics. Not politics, not economics, not making the best of bad options look good to outsiders. And perhaps he would have learned those things, given time. He has had no time, and cannot fake it.

Azula had three years' worth, and then she was gone.

And so he sits on his father's throne that was to be his sister's, in his father's throne room that was always full of orange flame but must have been blue for one single day, trying to remember Azula's smirking face and all the times she laughed at her older brother for his failures. It's no good; his mind fills up with her angry sobs and her bright fire and her smoother version of his own social awkwardness, as he sits in the garden where she used to taunt him, doing the bureaucratic paperwork she would have scorned.

He walks in her shadow, as he always will: his perfect sister, cruel and brilliant and strong.


End file.
